Mathematics for the interested outsider

The Character of a Representation

Now we introduce a very useful tool in the study of group representations: the “character” of a representation. And it’s almost effortless to define: the character of a matrix representation of a group is a complex-valued function on defined by

That is, the character is “the trace of the representation”. But why this is interesting is almost completely opaque at this point. I’m still not entirely sure why this formula has so many fabulous properties.

First of all, we need to recall something about the trace: it satisfies the “cyclic property”. That is, given an matrix and an matrix , we have

Indeed, if we write out the matrices in components we find

Then since the trace is the sum of the diagonal elements we calculate

but these are exactly the same!

We have to be careful, though, that we don’t take this to mean that we can arbitrarily reorder matrices inside the trace. If , , and are all matrices, we can conclude that

but we cannot conclude in general that any of the traces on the upper line are equal to any of the traces on the lower line. We can “cycle” matrices around inside the trace, but not rearrange them arbitrarily.

So, what good is this? Well, if is an invertible matrix and is any matrix, then we find that . If is a change of basis matrix, then this tells us that the trace only depends on the linear transformation represents, and not on the particular matrix. In particular, if and are two equivalent matrix representations then there is some intertwining matrix so that for all . The characters of and are therefore equal.

If is a -module, then picking any basis for gives a matrix representing each linear transformation . The previous paragraph shows that which particular matrix representation we pick doesn’t matter, since they’re all give us the same character . And so we can define the character of a -module to be the character of any corresponding matrix representation.

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This is mainly an expository blath, with occasional high-level excursions, humorous observations, rants, and musings. The main-line exposition should be accessible to the “Generally Interested Lay Audience”, as long as you trace the links back towards the basics. Check the sidebar for specific topics (under “Categories”).

I’m in the process of tweaking some aspects of the site to make it easier to refer back to older topics, so try to make the best of it for now.